


Still rebel nature holds out half my heart

by badxwolfxrising



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Accidental Marriage, Angst and Romance, Classic Tropes, Drama & Romance, Episode AU: s03e08 Human Nature, Episode AU: s03e08-09 Human Nature/Family of Blood, Eventual Smut, F/M, Implied Sexual Content, Maybe eventual babies IDK yet but it's me so there's a 50/50 chance on that, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Post-Episode: s02e07 The Idiot's Lantern, human nature au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-10
Updated: 2020-10-10
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:06:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26931088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/badxwolfxrising/pseuds/badxwolfxrising
Summary: “You had one job,” she huffed to herself despondently, staring at their disheveled reflections in the mirrored ceiling, the sleeping man next to her stretched out naked and oblivious to her inner turmoil. Keep the human Doctor safe, that was all she’d had to do. It was always going to be an easier said than done sort of task but she had apparently grossly miscalculated what sort of an undertaking it would actually be. Of all the instructions he’d given her before sealing his consciousness in the fob watch, how to avoid being seduced into consummating a drunken midnight marriage because his human self believed he had to dodge the draft was not amongst them.A post-Idiot's Lantern Human Nature AU where Ten is a private detective named Jamie McCrimmon and Rose is his wife via an accidental-on-purpose marriage and oh yeah, they're on the run from super smart space vampires who want to capture the Doctor for genetic experiments. XD
Relationships: Tenth Doctor/Rose Tyler
Comments: 16
Kudos: 35
Collections: Doctor Who Classic Tropes Event





	Still rebel nature holds out half my heart

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry that due to who I am as a person I had my classic tropes assignment for months and only wrote it in a rush the morning it was due, kind of like it was my Senior lit term paper. XD It took me so long in part because I wrote about 20 different versions of an intro to this story and had a dozen different variations on the same idea and I wrote a lot of words over these months but for some reason none of them felt like they fit quite right. What I ended up with here is almost close to the idea I had for a different version of On the Rocks once upon a time, before it got away from me. Except this time I hope I can follow through to finish because at the end of the day Ten x Rose will always be my main OTP and the idea of them having little domestic moments as a family in between traveling all of time and space makes me S O F T.

Rose was having the absolute ̶n̶a̶u̶g̶h̶t̶i̶e̶s̶t̶ loveliest dream.

Naked and pillowed in cloud-soft satin bedding, she and the Doctor were spooned together back to front, his leg slung protectively over her hip and his arm tucked under her own, fingers just barely grazing her breast. Sighing happily she nestled closer, thinking (but not minding) that he felt much warmer than usual, especially the part of him that was currently pressed against her bum, growing hot and hard (again?). The Doctor mumbled something incoherent into the crook of her neck as he rutted himself against her, lips warm where they brushed against her bare skin, sending a jolt of electricity straight to her core and suffusing her entire lower body with tingling warmth. A thousand times she’d had dreams like this but she almost always woke up hot and bothered before they could go anywhere. Not this time, though. This felt incredibly, blissfully real and she hoped it never ended or at least that she got her own happy ending before it did.

The hand cupping her breast skated lower, fingers skirted her navel, lower, lower… Rose’s eyes snapped open. This wasn’t a dream. Flipping to face him, she managed to squeak out a startled, “What are you doing?” before she realized that he was still asleep. Propping herself up on her elbows she surveyed their surroundings with dismay, the memories of the previous night rushing back with a sour taste like the cheap champagne they had soaked up while celebrating. It was an effort just to keep her head upright and she collapsed back against the bed with a defeated sigh, although she’d seen enough to start piecing together a clearer picture of the last twenty-four hours and she didn’t know how to cope with what the evidence suggested.

Her pink satin dress and the Doctor’s trousers had been discarded by the bed in a tangled pile on top of a shag carpet so loud, tacky, and aggressively crimson that they couldn’t be anywhere other than a casino hotel. The rest of their clothing (ahem) was nowhere to be seen aside from his suit jacket, which was just barely hanging over top of the lamp next to the bed. The empty bottle of champagne, plastic bouquet, and cheap birdcage veil hanging off the headboard completed the picture. It was the 27th of August 2965, they were in the honeymoon suite at the Fuchsia Flamingo in New Vegas, the Doctor still couldn’t land the TARDIS in the correct decade (or correct planet, to be honest) if his life depended on it, and she, Rose Marion McCrimmon (née Tyler), had royally cocked things up. And to top it off, they never did get to see Elvis, either.

“You had one job,” she huffed to herself despondently, staring at their disheveled reflections in the mirrored ceiling, the sleeping man next to her stretched out naked and oblivious to her inner turmoil. Keep the human Doctor safe, that was all she’d had to do. It was always going to be an easier said than done sort of task but she had apparently grossly miscalculated what sort of an undertaking it would actually be. Of all the instructions he’d given her before sealing his consciousness in the fob watch, how to avoid being seduced into consummating a drunken midnight marriage because his human self believed he had to dodge the draft was not amongst them. There hadn’t been time for him to over explain as he usually would’ve, aside from his insistence that above all else she could absolutely not let him eat pears. Why had he been so concerned about the bloody pears when he should’ve been worried about the fact that his human self was twice as irresistible and somehow even more charming than his Time Lord counterpart?

Of course part of her had known when he’d started the flirting that they were moving into dangerous territory but she’d ignored the klaxon shrieking in her head, drank the free drinks, and justified it all by telling herself she was just doing what she needed to do to keep him close for his own safety and could she really help it if he wanted to flirt with her and what was the harm in it? She’d been as easily charmed out of her knickers and into bed as one of the silly bints in the pound store romance novels Jackie loved to read and now there was no taking it back. How in the hell exactly was she supposed to explain _this_ when the Doctor became himself again? Not that they’d accidentally gotten married, but that they’d accidentally gotten New Vegas smashed and then had...well, new Vegas smashed. Several times in fact if memory served her correctly.

Rose’s entire body clenched like a fist. _The watch, oh my God, the watch._ Bolting out of the bed she fell to her knees by the pile of their collective clothes and began rifling through it, hoping against hope that the watch would be buried amongst them. The last place she remembered putting it was inside her jacket pocket, and her last vague memory of her jacket involved taking it off at the chapel and handing it to one of the attendants to hold while another attendant took their picture with the dozens of other couples who had rushed to the chapel to get married before the changes to the draft law went into effect. Jacket off for pictures...but she didn’t remember putting it back on.

“No, no, no, no, no,” she repeated over and over, scanning underneath the furniture in a panic. Surely, she’d brought it back to the room, she had to have, right? Even drunk and giddy she wouldn’t have forgotten something so important. Maybe it was just balled up behind the dresser or something. Wobbling like jelly, she got to her feet and frantically searched around the rest of the furniture before both her nerves and hangover demanded she promptly investigate the bathroom. Gagging, she splashed cool water from the tap into her mouth and onto her face, breathing slowly through her nose until the urge to empty her stomach passed, overtaken by the overwhelming need to cry. Just as she was about to lose her composure she stopped and looked at herself in the mirror and saw in the reflection there her jacket, knickers, and bra, all hanging off the back of the bathroom door, right where she had left them before they’d gotten into the jacuzzi together. Obviously in the heat of the moment and heart-shaped jacuzzi, her brain had filed the location of her jacket away as secondary to the events that had unfolded immediately afterwards. “Oh thank God,” she breathed a sigh of relief, silently thanking every celestial being she could think of off the top of her head. This was still some kind of disaster, but at least she hadn’t lost the watch. 

Turning the tap back on, she cupped her hands and gratefully drank from them before splashing more water on her face. Her jacket had been found, but not before her panicked brain had sounded every fight or flight alarm and dumped a bunch of stress hormones into her system. After so much running with the Doctor she should be used to high pressure situations but for some reason the idea of letting him down was a thousand times more terrifying than any Dalek or Cyberman could ever be. All she wanted to do was crawl back into bed, forget that Rose Tyler and the Doctor were hiding from alien mercenaries, and for just a moment enjoy pretending to be Mrs. McCrimmon, the human Doctor’s wife. Because for the next three months at a minimum or until it was safe for the Doctor to come back, for better or for worse, Mrs. McCrimmon was who she had to be and as it currently stood they had already broken the seal so what was the harm in continuing to play the game they had already started? Better to ask for forgiveness than permission and she wanted to believe that on the other side of a couple months living as a human husband and wife that she would be forgiven for giving into temptation. And who knew? Maybe on the other side of his humanity there could be a conversation about their own real feelings for each other, which she could no longer pretend didn’t exist. Drying her hands, she took a deep breath and tried to find her calm. Pointing a finger at herself in the mirror, she attempted a bit of a pep talk. “You’re gonna go out there, you’re gonna get in that bed, and you’re gonna shag that man rotten for the fourth or fifth time, and this time you won’t be too tipsy to remember how good it was. Go big or go home, Tyler. Woosah, you got this. Everything is fine. This is fine. This is just the inevitable end result of more than a year’s worth of unresolved sexual tension. The Doctor will forgive you. Everything is fine.”

But everything was not fine. Because as she went to leave the bathroom, she slipped her hand into the pocket of her jacket, just to feel the comforting weight of the watch in her palm, just to put her mind at ease. Her fingers poked into the corners of each pocket in disbelief, coming up empty save for the business card from the wedding chapel and the tin of emergency jelly babies she always kept on hand for when the Doctor got peckish.

The watch was gone.

* * * * *

_Approximately twenty hours previous, on board the TARDIS…_

“Rose, did they see your face?” the Doctor demanded, grabbing her firmly by the shoulders.

“I...I don’t know. I don’t think so?” she answered hesitantly, her stomach churning. “No, they couldn’t have. Maybe the back of my head at the most but not my face, at least I don’t think so.”

“Rose, I need you to be absolutely sure. Because if they saw your face that’s going to complicate things even further. But if they didn’t...then there may be something I can do. By Rassilon, I’m actually going to have to do it. I’m going to have to become human. Blimey, I was not prepared for this, not remotely prepared,” he exhaled, scrubbing at the back of his neck with his palm as he tended to do when he was anxious or thinking and in this case, a combination of the two. “I always hoped if I ever had the opportunity to become human that it’d be on a planet a little less naff than Nostalgia. It’s fun for a visit but I wouldn’t want to live here.”

“The people here aren’t in any danger though right, they just want you? Couldn’t we leave? We’ve got the TARDIS, we could go anywhere,” she pleaded, filled with a dread like nothing she’d ever felt before. It was rare and unsettling to see him this unnerved by an enemy, especially after all the enemies they had already faced together. If the Doctor was genuinely as frightened by these aliens as he seemed to be then it was probably time for her to start panicking too.

“If we leave they’ll just follow me through the TARDIS’s energy signature and the more of a fight I put up the angrier they’ll get and the more dangerous they’ll become. The Carmillaites have been trying to capture a Time Lord for experimental purposes for years and they’ll stoop to any level to accomplish their goals. I can’t risk endangering others if we try to run to some other planet and they decided to blow it up to make a point. They already know I’m here, they know what I smell like but they don’t know what I look like in this regeneration. If I make myself human they won’t be able to smell me, I can hide out long enough for them to hopefully assume that I somehow died or snuck off this planet, lose interest and move on. Human me won’t know or remember who I really am though or that I’m hiding, so I’d need you to keep him and the watch safe. That’s why we need to be sure they didn’t see your face. If they even suspect for a second that you’re connected to me in any way they might try to get to me through you. So I need to be totally sure that they didn’t see your face because if they did then you could be in danger and then I don’t know what I’m gonna do because becoming human is about the only plan I’ve got right now to keep everyone else safe but not if it puts you in danger,” he babbled incoherently.

She wasn’t sure at all if she’d been seen or not but the Doctor needed her to be sure and she needed to believe that she had what it took to keep both of them safe even if the Carmillaites had somehow caught a glimpse of her running, which she didn’t think they had but couldn’t really be 100% sure because of how fast everything had happened. “They didn’t see my face, I’m sure of it. They couldn’t have, I was around the corner before they even got out the door. Do what you have to do..and I’ll do what I have to do to keep us safe.”

The Doctor stopped his nervous pacing to pull her into a hug. “I knew I could count on you. We make a great team.”

“How are you gonna become human though?” she asked, still more confused than anything.

He pulled back from her, grinning. “You’re gonna think this bit is neat. I’m going to take my Time Lord consciousness and get this, I’m gonna hide it in a watch. Time Lord, watch, keeping time, keeping Time Lords inside of watches. Well, it’s not actually a watch at all, it’s really just a component of the chameleon arch that’s been designed to look like a watch so it’ll blend in. So it isn’t a watch but it looks like a watch and that’s really what matters for the sake of this time-based metaphor. Isn’t that brilliant?”

Rose frowned. “If I didn’t know better, I’d almost think you’d been waiting for an excuse to do this.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” the Doctor scoffed, reaching up to grab a helmet-looking device that had descended from the ceiling. “Becoming human is extremely inconvenient, I definitely haven’t been looking for an excuse to do it and I most certainly did not pre-emptively make you a how-to-video last week on caring for my human self in anticipation of just such an opportunity.”

“Is it gonna hurt?” she asked, worrying her bottom lip with her teeth.

With grim determination, he fitted the helmet to his head. “Rewriting every single cell in my body to become human and stuffing my Time Lord consciousness into a pocket watch? Oh yeah Rose, it’s gonna hurt.”

* * * * *


End file.
